Richard Branson Shares Eco-Vision of IT in Space

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Richard Branson Shares Eco-Vision of IT in Space

Yesterday, at the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's suborbital spaceship design, Richard Branson talked about how his commitment to the environment fits with the new spaceship.

"It was Stephen Hawking who first got me thinking about this issue," Branson started. He went on to say that with the end of the oil era approaching and climate change progressing faster then the models predicted that the utilization of space for agricultural monitoring, climate science, and someday even space based solar power is essential.

"Aviation is often singled out as a key component of climate change," he said, "While I believe that aviation has to get much more carbon efficient then it is today, it is important that people begin to realize that seemingly benign industries such as IT have in fact overtaken aviation in terms of their CO2 output."

Branson commented that the nearly half billion servers around the world each are consuming hundreds of watts. He then added an interesting twist: what if we could literally take some of that heat off of the planet by someday using space as a repository for our information technology?

The White Knight Two mother ship could carry a low earth orbit launcher with a 50-100 kg satellite to orbit. Might Branson have a vision for orbiting server farms getting their power directly from the sun and beaming electrons back and forth to end users sitting on the surface of the planet?

We were even speculating afterwards about sun facing polar orbits that could keep a set of solar panels in the sunlight 24/7.

If server farm power costs and the factored in costs to the environment at home get high enough maybe the IT world would be interested in space hardening and launching their servers. Maybe being an IT server technician would become a new career path into low earth orbit – now that could be a big hit in the IT world.

Even if it is a long way off, I was glad that Branson and Hawking are thinking about it. Creativity and long range thinking are going to be keys to the next 50 years – on this planet and off.